The Boy Who Could See Demons (2 page)

But that’s just the best thing about my room. You know what the best
best
thing about my room is?

When Ruen comes, I can blether on at him for ages. And no one else can hear.

So when I found out that Ruen is a
demon
I wasn’t scared because I didn’t know a demon was a
thing
. I thought it was just the name of the shop near my school that sold motorbikes.

‘What’s a demon, then?’ I asked Ruen.

He was Ghost Boy then. Ruen has four appearances: Horn Head, Monster, Ghost Boy and Old Man. Ghost Boy is when he looks like me, only in a funny kind of way: he has my exact same brown hair and is as tall as me and even has the same knobbly fingers and fat nose and sticky-out ears, but he has eyes that are completely black and sometimes his whole body is see-through like a balloon. His clothes are different than mine, too. He wears trousers that are puffy and gather in at the knees and a white shirt with no collar, and his feet are bare and dirty.

When I asked what a demon was, Ruen jumped up and started shadow boxing in front of the mirror on the back of my bedroom door.

‘Demons are like superheroes,’ he said between jabs. ‘Humans are like maggots.’

I was still sitting on the floor. I’d lost our game of chess. Ruen had let me take all his pawns and bishops and then checkmated me with just his king and queen.

‘Why are humans like maggots?’ I asked.

He stopped boxing and turned to me. I could see the mirror through him so I kept my gaze on that rather than look him in the face, because his black eyes made my stomach feel funny.

‘It’s not your fault your mum gave birth to you,’ he said, and started doing star jumps. Because he’s like a ghost his jumps looked like scribbles in the air.

‘But why are humans like maggots?’ I asked. Unlike humans, maggots look like crawling fingernails and they live at the bottom of our wheelie bin.

‘Because they’re stupid,’ he said, still jumping.

‘How
are humans stupid, then?’ I said, standing up.

He stopped jumping and looked at me. His face was angry.

‘Look,’ he said, and held out his hand towards me. ‘Now put yours on top of mine.’

I did. You couldn’t see the floor through mine.

‘You have a body,’ he said. ‘But you’ll probably waste it, everything you can do with it. Just like free will. It’s like giving a Lamborghini to an infant.’

‘So you’re jealous, then?’ I asked, because a Lamborghini is a really cool car that everyone wants.

‘A baby driving a sportscar would be a bad idea, wouldn’t it? Somebody needs to step in, stop the kid from doing more damage than it needs to.’

‘So demons look after babies, then?’ I said.

He looked disgusted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What
do
they do, then?’

And then he gave me his Alex Is Stupid look. It’s when he smiles with only half his mouth and his eyes are small and hard and he shakes his head as if I’m a disappointment. It’s the look that makes my stomach knot and my heart beat faster because deep down I know I
am
stupid.

‘We try and help you see past the lie.’

I blinked. ‘What lie?’

‘You all think you’re so important, so special. It’s a fallacy, Alex. You’re nothing.’

Now I’m ten I’m much older so I kind of know more about demons and Ruen’s not like that. I think everyone’s got it wrong about demons, just like they did about Rottweilers. Everyone says Rottweilers eat children but Granny had one called Milo and he always just licked my face and let me ride him like a pony.

Mum never sees Ruen, and I haven’t told her about him or about any of the demons who come into our house. Some of them are a bit strange, but I just ignore them. It’s like having loads of grumpy relatives tramping through the place, thinking they can order me about. Ruen’s OK, though. He ignores Mum and likes poking around our house. He loves Granddad’s old piano that sits in the hallway. He’ll stand beside it for ages, leaning down to have a closer look at the wood as if there’s a miniature village living in the grain. Then he lowers down to press his ear against the bottom half, as if there’s someone inside trying to talk to him. He tells me this was a
stupendous make of piano
, once upon a time, but he’s very irritated by the way Mum keeps it pressed up against a radiator and doesn’t get it tuned.
Sounds like an old dog
, he says, rapping it with his knuckles like a door. I just shrug and say,
Big deal
. Then he gets so cross that he vanishes.

Ruen sometimes turns into the Old Man when he gets cross. If I look like him when I get older, I’ll honestly kill myself. When he’s the Old Man he’s so skinny and withered he looks like a cactus with eyes and ears. His face is long as a spade with lots of wrinkles grooved so deep he looks sort of scrunched up, like tin foil that’s been reused. He’s got a long hooked nose and his mouth reminds me of a piranha’s. His head is shiny as a silver doorknob and is covered in wispy tufts of fine white hair. His face is grey like a pencil but the bags under his eyes are bright pink, as if someone’s ripped the skin off. He’s really ugly.

But this isn’t as bad as what he looks like when he’s Monster. Monster is like a dead body that’s been underwater for weeks and is dragged up by the police on to a small boat and everyone pukes because the skin is the colour of an aubergine and the head is three times’ the size of a normal person’s head. And that’s not all: when he’s Monster, Ruen’s face isn’t a face. His mouth looks like someone blew a hole there with a shotgun and his eyes are tiny like a lizard’s.

Here’s another thing: he says he’s nine thousand human years old.
Yeah, right
, I said when he first told me, but he just tilted his chin and spent the next hour telling me how he could speak more than six thousand languages, even the ones that no one spoke any more. He went on and on about how humans don’t even know their own language, not really, and don’t even have proper words for big things like
guilt
and
evil
, that it was
idiotic
that a country with so many different kinds of rain should only have one word for it, blah blah blah, until I yawned for about five minutes solid and he took the hint and left. But the next day, it rained, and I thought,
Maybe Ruen isn’t such an eejit after all. Maybe he actually has a point
. Some rain is like little fish, some is like big globby chunks of spit, and some is like ball bearings. So I started to borrow books from the library to learn some words in lots of cool languages, like Turkish and Icelandic and Maori.

‘Merhaba
, Ruen,’ I said to him one day, and he just sighed and said, ‘It’s a silent “h”, you imbecile.’ So I said,
‘Góða kvöldið’
and he snapped, ‘It’s still only mid-morning,’ and when I said,
‘He roa te wā kua kitea,’
he said I was as obtuse as a gnu.

‘What language is that?’ I asked.

‘English,’ he sighed, and disappeared.

So I started reading the dictionary to understand the weird words he uses all the time, like
brouhaha
. I tried using that word with Mum about the riots last July. She thought I was laughing at her.

Ruen also told me all this stuff about people I had never heard of. He said one of his best mates for ages was called Nero, but that Nero preferred to be called Seezer by everyone and still peed the bed when he was like twenty years old.

Then Ruen told me he’d stayed in a prison cell with a guy called Sock-rat-ease when Sock-rat-ease was on a death sentence. Ruen told Sock-rat-ease that he should escape. Ruen said that he even had some of Sock-rat-ease’s friends offer to help him escape, but Sock-rat-ease wouldn’t, so he just died.

‘That’s mental,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ said Ruen.

It sounded like Ruen had loads of friends, which made me sad because I didn’t have any except him.

‘Who was your
best
friend?’ I asked him, hoping he’d say me.

He said Wolfgang.

I asked,
Why Wolfgang
? and what I meant was why was Wolfgang his best friend and not me, but all Ruen said was he liked Wolfgang’s music and then he went quiet.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m crazy and Ruen is all in my head, not just his voice. That I watch too many horror movies. That Ruen’s an imaginary friend I’ve dreamed up because I’m lonely. Well, you’d be incredibly wrong if you thought any of that. Though sometimes I am lonely.

Mum bought me a dog for my eighth birthday that I named Woof. Woof reminds me of a grumpy old man cos he’s always barking and baring his teeth and his fur is white and tough like an old man’s hair. Mum calls him the barking footstool. Woof used to sleep beside my bed and run down the stairs to bark at people when they came into the house in case they were going to kill me, but when Ruen started appearing more often Woof got scared. He just growls at thin air now, even when Ruen isn’t there.

Which reminds me. Ruen told me something today that I thought was interesting enough to bother writing down. He said he’s not just a demon. His real title is a H
arrower
.

When he said it he was the Old Man. He smiled like a cat and all his wrinkles stretched. He said it the way Auntie Bev tells people that she’s a doctor. I think it means a lot to Auntie Bev that she’s a doctor, because nobody in our family ever went to university before, or drove a Mercedes and bought their own house like Auntie Bev.

I reckon Ruen is proud of being a Harrower because it means he is someone very important in Hell. When I asked Ruen what a Harrower was, he told me to think of what the word meant. I tried to look it up in my dictionary but it described a gardening tool, which makes no sense. When I asked again, Ruen said did I know what a soldier was. I said,
Duh, of course I do
, and he said,
Well, if a regular demon’s a soldier, I would be comparable to a Commander General or Field Marshal
. So I said,
Do demons fight in wars, then
? And he said
No, though they are always fighting against the Enemy
. And I said that sounded paranoid, and he scowled and said,
Demons are
perpetually vigilant, not paranoid
. He
still
won’t tell me exactly what a Harrower is, so I’ve decided to make up my own definition: a Harrower is a manky old sod who wants to show off his war medals and hates that only I can see him.

Wait. I think I can hear Mum downstairs. Yep, she’s crying again. Maybe I should pretend that I don’t notice. I’ve got rehearsals for
Hamlet
in seventy-two and a half minutes. Maybe she’s just doing it for attention. But my room has started filling with demons, about twenty of them sitting on my bed and huddled in corners, whispering and giggling. They’re all talking excitedly like it’s Christmas or something, and one of them just said my mum’s name. I have a funny feeling in my tummy.

Something is happening downstairs.

‘What’s going on?’ I just asked Ruen. ‘Why are they talking about my mum?’

He looked at me and raised one of his caterpillar eyebrows. ‘My dear boy, Death has arrived at your front door.’

3

THE FEELING

Anya

The call came this morning at seven-thirty.

Ursula Hepworth, the senior consultant at MacNeice House Child and Adolescent Mental Health Inpatient Unit in Belfast, rang me on my mobile and mentioned a ten-year-old boy at risk of possibly harming himself and others. Name of Alex Broccoli, she said. Alex’s mother attempted suicide yesterday and has since been sectioned, while the boy has been taken to the paediatric unit at the City Hospital. Alex was at his home in west Belfast and had spent an hour alone with her, trying to call for help. Eventually a lady coming to collect Alex for a drama group intervened and took the pair to hospital. Quite understandably, the boy was in quite a state. Ursula informed me that a social worker named Michael Jones had already had contact with the boy and that he was concerned about his mental health. Alex’s mother has attempted suicide at least four times in the last five years. Eight out of ten children who witness a parent self-harm will go on to repeat the action on themselves.

‘Typically, I would be the lead clinician on this boy’s case,’ Ursula explained, her Greek accent sliced up by Northern Irish tones. ‘But as our new child and adolescent psychiatry consultant I thought I’d pass the baton over to you. What do you say?’

I sat up in bed, greeted by a swathe of boxes all over the floor of my new flat. It’s a four-room place on the outskirts of the city, so close to the ocean that I wake to the sound of seagulls and the faint smell of salt. It is tiled floor to ceiling in a tomato-red tile that burns like the inside of a furnace every sunrise, on account of the fact that the flat faces east and I haven’t had the chance to buy curtains. I haven’t had time to furnish it either, such have been the demands of this new job since moving back from Edinburgh two weeks ago.

I glanced at my watch. ‘When would you need me to come in?’

‘In an hour?’

The sixth of May has been circled in my work schedule as a day off for the past three years, and was agreed at the point I signed my employment contract. It always will be for the rest of my working life. On this day, those who I count as my closest friends will arrive bearing consolation offerings of cheesecake, tender embraces, photo albums of me and my daughter in happier times, when she was alive and relatively well. Some of these friends will not have seen me for months, but even when their hair colour has changed and other relationships have ended, these friends will show up on my doorstep to help me purge this day out of my calendar for another year. And it will always be so.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and I began to explain about my contract, about the fact that I’ve booked this day off and perhaps she could interview the boy for today and I could catch up on his notes tomorrow?

There was a long pause.

‘This is really quite important,’ she said sternly.